"I have never been separate from God, nor can I be, except in my mind."

— Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ

The mystics across traditions have said this in a thousand different ways. That the distance we feel from the divine is not a distance at all. It is a story the small self tells, and tells convincingly.

The small self needs the gap. It needs to feel cut off, unworthy—because unworthiness is its currency. As long as we believe we are fundamentally separate, the ego has a job to do: earn belonging, perform goodness, manage the impression we make on God and on each other. The spiritual journey, in this distorted frame, becomes one long audition.

But Rohr names what the contemplatives always knew: the separation was never real. We have always been held. Many of us came to Egos Anonymous because the small self's story finally collapsed under its own weight—because something in us knew the gap was a lie before we had words for it. Recovery, at its deepest, is not about becoming someone new. The True Self does not return to God. It wakes up and finds it never left.